You will find yourself longing for home, the rowdiness, the chaos and the antiseptic smell of hospitals you were familiar with. But home is far, far away and you would not know how to live without constant light and with mosquitoes for night time squatters.
By Damilola Olaniyi
Attempting to walk immediately after being bedridden for days is as unreasonable as lying on your back without a pillow when you’re not exactly slender. It feels like being between a rock and a hard place, a reminder that your judgement might be skewed and perhaps, you should query all future decisions.
Migrating to a new country in your mid-thirties is somewhat like that. You do not know if you want to be or to become. You agree with yourself never to code-switch but then you do, almost like second nature when your white colleagues cannot understand your clear English in spite of their Scottish drawls and their bad English more than half the time.
Immediately after a long conversation, you might find yourself hanging your head in disgrace when you remember you said yous instead of you all. It feels like a betrayal of your roots and it is a shame to the good education your parents paid good money to ensure you got.
I remember trying to fit seven years of marriage into two 23-kg boxes. It was as sad as it was impossible. But japa predecessors seemed to be having a good time in ‘the abroad’ and were never home sick. So, why was I sad at the thought of leaving my house and wondering if it was the right move? Why was I asking myself if I should travel with my wedding picture frame in my box or hold onto it as a picture on my smartphone?
Travelling humbles you. You realise that you were a celebrity at your local airport because you knew people by their names, and they you, because you were a frequent traveller. But when you lose a sister to the ineptitude of the Teaching Hospital and then realise that the student doctor who attended to her was unsupervised when it mattered, you start to question everything you ever knew and believed.
You ask yourself if it is worth it to love as deeply as you’ve loved and then you might start to systematically detach yourself from everything familiar. It is sad but you cannot help dying while you are still alive.
It appears to be out of your hands. You want to fight the system, take the matter to court but almost immediately, the student doctor disappears and his superiors argue about the procedure you just saw, stage a massive cover up and then refer to your sister in the past tense almost immediately. You do not even get the pleasure of slapping the doctor.
As you flee from home, you wonder if you will ever be back. You decide to write to her children but you always start the letter and never finish it. You let all your hobbies drift away, you fall into a routine, you take factory jobs your father spent his entire life slaving away at so that you never had to do it and you do not call home for seven months.
You become ashamed of yourself, you cannot remember how you got to the zombified state you are in, you cry into your pillow every night because you are lonely, and your skin looks pale from a lack of sunlight. You want to add weight like all the noveau I-just-got-backs that used to visit around the festive months but you have just enough to pay your bills and nothing else.
Then you still have to borrow some money from the very few friends who know just how disillusioned you are to renew your visa. At least, they do not begrudge you your anger and vexation. They smile when you vent and they even let you cry into the phone calls that you pick.
It’s too late now but you realise that there is no easy job in your new country and that your life is no longer your own. It is for council tax, monthly rent, gas, water, electricity, internet and phone bills. And Spotify subscription, too. Without evocative music, you might quickly go insane.
When you attempt to walk for the first time after you have been on a medically induced rest, you will find your legs buckling under you and your mind will jump to National Geographic clips of new colts. Except that the new colt is you and you had to seek private medical care for what ails you because the NHS is on its knees.
You will find yourself longing for home, the rowdiness, the chaos and the antiseptic smell of hospitals you were familiar with. But home is far, far away and you would not know how to live without constant light and with mosquitoes for night time squatters.
You will eventually start to make peace with your demons but you will walk through the fire of odd jobs and a dicey sanity before you ever get your mind back to 2019 when you could pay for cable TV without worrying about your bank balance.
And when you step out of the house on an autumn day, in the blistering cold with watery eyes and frozen fingers, you try to keep the longing out of your heart. Then you get on the train before day breaks and your sister calls you.
You pick her call with a trembling voice while rubbing your numb fingers on your trousers to get some feeling back. Then she tearfully tells you of a colleague lost to a misfired police gun as they tried to stop the car in front of her staff bus. You shudder as you comfort her because she is fortunate this time and it could have been her.
The train announcer calls your station and you put your phone away and stand up to join the queue disembarking. You look over your shoulder twice, adjust your beanie once to fight the wind tousling your hair and you put one foot in front of the other as the morning clouds bring the smell of rain.
Damilola Olaniyi is a Nigerian writer who enjoys writing about often-overlooked topical issues. She enjoys researching, writing for young readers and devising fresh methods to challenge norms. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming in Kalahari Review, The Writing Disorder, Ngiga Review, SugarSugarSalt Magazine and elsewhere. You can find her on Twitter @cdolaniyi
Cover photo credit: Nicolas Postiglioni